My putative insolence and knavery is not in any wise the cause of your disgruntlement and bad temper, a condition you have exhibited since your youth without cess.

As for your difficulties in sitting correctly in the saddle, you must know well that the causes of that difficulty lie likewise distant in the past, and are traceable to your unfortunate genes, the accident of your birth, or your regrettable upbringing.

As to which us is truly a churl, a fluffbrain, a prate, a poltroon, a poseur, and no gentleman, let us consider which among the two of us resorts most often to brutality as a means of persuasion, to contests of bloodletting and physical harm in order to resolve what are purely cognitive difficulties, and which of us uses blunt instruments as representative substitutes for personal prowess. In consideration of which variables, I am sure I can expect with all confidence your early return to your alleged senses in this matter.

I figuratively take pen in hand to inform you that your insolence and knavery is not only unbecoming to you, but is beginning to annoy me. When I become annoyed I deem it needful to remove the cause of the irritation, much as one would squeeze a pimple or lance a boil that was preventing one from sitting correctly in the saddle. Please be assured that at “Getaway” I shall indeed have swords with me and, if you are a gentleman, you will give me satisfaction to the Third Blood. Should you not do so I shall be forced to post you as a churl, a fluffbrain, a prate, a poltroon, a poseur, and no gentleman.

Oh, Mom, Mom...I know how hard this is for you. That the House of BS should have fallen so low. It is an awful pass, indeed, and it is the wickedest of your offspring who has brought your House so low, and on Rapaire's shoulders the blame must lie. Let the rest be forgiven for being led into error by his manipulative ways. Oh, woe for the House of Mom. When shall the clear sound of True BS be heard again in this land?

Oh, woe. And fie upon the son of Mom who has laid her so low!! You muffin-head.

Yes, Rapaire, you must own the sin, and the abuse you have spawned, and suffer the tortures of Prometheus, tasked forever with the terrible sin of unleashing the horrors of Ugly Code upon the house of our Mother. May the vultures eat your liver by day, and may it re-grow by night, through all your immortal days for this hubris.

Janie, Rap can't be a red Herod. He has never admitted to being red, for one thing. It is amusing to me that there was a time when the very people who make states turn red on the political maps these days once went around muttering "Better dead than..." in respect to that much maligned martian hue.

Herod, of course, is way beyond Rap in terms of pure evil-doing. He had an army, where Rapaire has a gun collection. He decimated a whole generation in order to prevent the arrival of the New Truth, whereas Rapaire just kills paper targets and baby squirrels. There are many other differences, also, I am sure, which I will remark on when they come to mind...

Well and good, dear sir, but you know, we are all very fond of you just as you are; there's no need to go bragging around about stuff from your past. I took have shelves of old UNIX stuff. No SATAN programs, but I was just a lowly USER, not an exalted SYSADMIN!! My god!! My compliments and fulsome praise go to /dev null.

No, I've know for years how to do some of this stuff. ASCII hasn't been a foreign soil to me for, oh, 15 years or so. HTML isn't all THAT hard, and XML is no stranger. Twelve years as an official Sysad and four more as an unofficial one can provide one with a LOT of arcane knowledge, Amos. I have, for instance, a 4 inch thick looseleaf binder contains password cracker programs, SATAN, and quite a few things I'd prefer not to discuss too openly -- they were useful to me and may be again someday. chmod 700*, baby!

Better stick to Lox on bagels. You try eating the doors, they'll just put you in a straitjacket...

As for your terribly impressive knowledge of the barbarian lands in the area of Upper ASCII, I have not a whit of jealousy in me on that score. You are retired and can afford to spend your time driveling over inverse character codes and writing backwards just because you find it amusing.

I am still in harness, and my letters are written for commerce, exchange, and the preservation of intellectual property. Or intellectual propriety. Or something. But whatever it is it sure doesn't leave room to lollygag around with binary barbarisms of this ilk.

Ladies don't duel. However, I will let Jacqui know that you are an early volunteer for the Mummer's play, and prefer to be either St. George or the Turk. (as best I recall, those are the 2 characters that rattle swords.) Maybe you can also be the Herald and toot your trumpet at the head of the procession. She will be thrilled.

ANd ever since he has been convinced that 4 + 7 equals three. Sad, but true.

Binary does that to a man. It makes him forget his manners, insult his mother, and lose touch with basic human affections, and abandon altogether his connection with the beauties of breathing and living in an infinity-valued analog universe. Teach a man binary, and he becomes something less than human, a calculating machine who does not remember the soaring magic of learning arithmetic in a real world, a lunatic fringe-living creature who can no longer stand in sunlight or kiss in moonlight, a dry and withered half-soul given over to the endless curses of Boolean expressions and the iron-hard fruits of the logick tree. Thus, Rapaire, once a proud Keeper of Human Wisdome, now lured and betrayed by the rusty, ratcheting siren song of binary, frozen in time between the crushing deadly pillars of Either and Or, ground between the stony wheels of IF and ENDIF.

We mourn the loss of our friend, and his of us, once his stout companions and loyal supporters.

Janie, you jist remember that even I one time almost made a mistake. I was called to the board in 2nd grade to do an arithmetic problem, I remember it was "4 + 7 = ?" and I prit near put down "1011" before I remember we weren't working in binary but in base 10 and put down "11". Weren't nobody saw it 'cept me, but the knowledge I'm 'most made an error haunted me fer years.

Janie, honey chile, I kin make it worser fer ya. So now don't you go bein' jealous and all just cuz your HTML thing didn't work. Lots of stuff don't work the first time you try them. Why, even Robert E. Lee had to learn to be a Gener'l. 'Course he had a head start, being in the Army and all.

Well, I did preview, and in preview it was quite impressive, all that cascading text against a blank, white field. T'weren't until I hit submit that the location of that pretty cascading text became apparent.

You should appreciate what a dutiful daughter to MOM and how mindful I was of the large but tender egos here, that I asked him to fix it before Stilly, LH, and Mmario saw the wonder I had wrought, and you and Amos stood humiliated in the face of my awesome html code.

I just returned to the library from a very wet, very cold day at the farmers' market, giving books to eager, wet children. I see a whole lot more than falling numbers cascading down the page. From here it looks like little letters dribbling and dripping down the sides of the bookwagon. Before I start hallucinating even more, I'm going to go home and take a nap. Only then will I tackle the drive to Salt Lake City to deliver an anxious Tom to the grandparents for a week.